Preserving contrasting past memories and narratives can be difficult in unreceptive social and political environments where prohibition of commemorative events and vandalism are employed hand in hand to sabotage memorialization efforts. At one level, problems with memorials are not confined to post-conflict societies: memorialization of those who lost wars – such as Japan in the Second World War – is often suppressed in the name of preserving liberal order. On another level, across the Asian region the emergence of ethno-religious nationalism against the backdrop of authoritarian regimes has become alarmingly common.
The edited collection will probe how policing, obstruction and trivialization of memories play out in the contemporary socio-economic and political landscapes across Asia, using selected case studies. It would attempt to investigate how certain memories are selectively negated by some groups while new memories are sometimes constructed of events that never happened through the distortion and fabrication of history. How certain memories are weaponized and used as tropes in rhetoric against the targeted ‘other’ and abused to serve as justification for calls for genocidal violence, projected as ‘retributive’ in nature will also be explored. More broadly, the proposed book will investigate how both policing and weaponization of memorialization play out, not only affecting everyday lived experiences but also posing a barrier for democracy. We wish to invite scholars to explore the international politics of genocide denial and recognition, such as Turkey’s denial of the Armenian genocide, Pakistan’s denial of the Bangladesh genocide, Myanmar’s denial of genocide against Rohingyas, Indonesia’s denial of the genocidal violence in East Timor and against the communists, Sri Lanka’s and Japan’s denial of their war crimes, India’s denial of the massacres of its religious minorities, such as the 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms in Delhi and the 2002 anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat, etc.; apology and reparations; the lack of conviction in cases of mass violence; why and how the guilty escape justice; the challenges before prosecution, the obstacles and hurdles in achieving reconciliation; competitive victimhood; the act of justifying mass violence by describing it as retributive in nature, often accompanied by a deep seated sense of majority victimhood; the forces of resistance, both domestic and foreign, to state narratives of conflict; trivialization of genocide memory; the proliferation of genocide terminology; the phenomenon of blaming the victim; Holocaust inversion; disputes over historical legacies in public spaces; and any other aspect of memory contestation and conflict of narratives.
Scope of the Edited Volume
In such context, the main objective of the proposed edited volume is to offer insights into contested memories in the Asian region. The prospective contributors will include scholars, academics, research students, activists, and peacebuilders, but will not be limited only to them. Through this book, we would like to initiate a wider thematic debate on memory discourse, local conditions and responses, inspired by the pluralist values, the rule of law and peace and reconciliation efforts.
Chapter proposals of around 300 words with a biographical profile of the author (around 200 words) as a single Word file are invited for the above mentioned envisioned edited volume latest by 1 April 2024. The successful contributors will be invited to submit their full paper between 5,000 - 8,000 words (excluding references) at a later date. The edited volume will be published by an international academic publisher.
Timeline
Year 1
- Month 1: Preparatory work
- Month 2: Call for Papers
- Month 3-4: Review of EOIs
- Month 5-7: Submission of full papers (first draft)
- Month 7-10: Editorial feedback
- Month 10-12: Submission of the second draft
Year 2
- Month 1-3: Line-editing of manuscripts
- Month 4-6: Copy-editing of manuscripts
- Month 7-9: Compiling the final draft
- Month 10-12: Identifying a potential publisher
Year 3
- Month 1-4: Line-editing by the publisher
- Month 5-8: Publication
- Month 9-12: Book launch and dissemination of findings
Bios of Editors
Dr. Navras J. Aafreedi is an Assistant Professor of History at Presidency University, Kolkata, a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, New York, and a Fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar under its Holocaust Education & Genocide Prevention Program and its Asia Peace Innovators Forum. Besides several papers in peer-reviewed journals, chapters in edited collections published by prestigious international scholarly publishing houses, such as De Gruyter, Routledge, Springer, Indiana University Press, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Lexington, etc., and op-eds in popular media, his numerous publications include a monograph Jews, Judaizing Movements and the Traditions of Israelite Descent in South Asia (New Delhi: Pragati Publications, 2016) and a co-edited collection Conceptualizing Mass Violence: Representations, Recollections, and Reinterpretations (London and New York: Routledge, 2021). He has held visiting fellowships at the universities of Tel Aviv (2006-2007) and Sydney (2015), and at the Woolf Institute, Cambridge, UK (2010). Dr. Aafreedi was a scholar-in-residence at the ISGAP-Oxford Summer Institute on Curriculum Development in Critical Antisemitism Studies at St. John's College, Oxford in 2017. He received the degrees of BA, MA and PhD from the University of Lucknow. He commenced his teaching career at Gautam Buddha University, Greater Noida in 2010 and has been teaching at Presidency University, Kolkata since 2016. His latest publication is a chapter titled "Hitler's Popularity and the Trivialization of the Holocaust in India" in Holocaust vs. Popular Culture: Interrogating Incompatibility and Universalization, edited by Mahitosh Mandal & Priyanka Das (London and New York: Routledge, 2023). His forthcoming publications will be brought out by Brill, Oxford University Press, Routledge, University of Nebraska Press, Wiley-Blackwell, Academic Studies Press, etc.
Dishani Senaratne is a doctoral researcher at the University of Queensland, focusing on the emergence of ethnolinguistic nationalism and its alignment with Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. She's also the Founder/Project Director of Writing Doves, a non-profit initiative that employs a literature-based approach to enhance young learners' intercultural understanding. Earlier, she taught English at the University of Sabaragamuwa of Sri Lanka. In addition, she’s a Fellow at the Salzburg Global Seminar.
Chapter Proposal Submission Deadline: 1 April, 2024
Email Addresses for Communication (Please email your proposal to both addresses given below):
Dr. Navras J. Aafreedi, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Presidency University, Kolkata, India: navras.his@presiuniv.ac.in
Dishani Senaratne, PhD Scholar, School of Political Science & International Studies, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia: dish3000e@gmail.com
